


Can't Live Without

by ice_hot_13



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: F/F, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-25
Updated: 2020-07-25
Packaged: 2021-03-05 18:55:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25510180
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ice_hot_13/pseuds/ice_hot_13
Summary: Becoming Leia's wife also means Cara becomes Ben's stepmother, and parenting a teenager is absolutely not in her skillset. (Parents-of-high-schoolers AU)
Relationships: Boba Fett/The Mandalorian (The Mandalorian TV), Cara Dune/Leia Organa
Comments: 17
Kudos: 145





	Can't Live Without

**Author's Note:**

> ok i know i'm getting old when i can more easily imagine a parents-of-high-schoolers AU than a high-school au, but here we are. just a not-super-serious feel-good fluffy fic from tumblr i wanted posted all in one place! also, i'm obsessed with cara/leia even though they've probably never met. they could have, ok.

“Do you know why kids start out as babies?”

Leia lays blouses into her suitcase, smoothing each one out carefully. She has so many packed that Cara wonders if maybe Leia’s going away for seven weeks, and not just two and a half. They’re all neutral-colored ones, though, blush and beige and white. That means she’s anticipating being stern and tough on whoever she’s scheduled to visit. Cara’s favorite blouse is the burnt orange one, but it still hangs in their closet. It makes Leia look like she should be somewhere deliciously warm and balmy, laughing as the glowing sun sets.

“Why?” Cara remains flopped on the bed and doesn’t lift her head as Leia continues moving around the room. Leia’s dangling earrings sway as she bends down to open the lower dresser drawers, and when her hair is pulled up in a bun like this, it makes Cara remember just how much she loves kissing Leia’s neck. Leia comes back with a pair of pants to lay into the suitcase.

“Because babies are easy. You don’t think they’re easy at the time, but they’re uncomplicated. Starting out with a teenager is going straight to hard mode.” Leia reaches over to squeeze Cara’s ankle gently. “Teenagers are tough. You aren’t able to make the whole world right for them anymore and sometimes it feels like they’re mad that you can’t. Everything is so _big_ for them. But you’re doing great.” She smiles; Cara tries to manage the same.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather he go to Han’s?”

“You’ll do fine.” Leia crosses back to the closet, stands in front of her shoes. “Stability is important for Ben, and you’re part of that.”

“He _wants_ to go to his dad’s.” Ben had been quite clear about that. Fifteen-year-olds are a lot of things, and subtle is rarely one of them. Loud, stubborn, surly, all of those make frequent appearances.

“Han hasn’t been able to provide him with a routine.” Leia comes back with two pairs of shoes. “Ben always wants to go while I’m on a trip, but Han lets him get away with murder, and everything spirals. Ben does best when he knows the routine.”

“Can I deviate a tiny bit from the routine and get pizza for dinner? Score some cool stepmom points?”

“Maybe not _every_ night I’m gone. You should do Chinese at least once,” Leia smiles radiantly, “he likes Chinese even more.”

“We’ll be okay.” Cara sits up, though she can’t make herself get off the bed just yet. She can hear Ben stomping down the stairs. “We will,” she adds, when she sees the anxiety that hovers around Leia’s shoulders.

Leia’s career as an OSHA inspector takes her away on business trips to perform inspections relatively frequently; her guilt over it comes out whenever she receives a phone call from Ben’s school saying he’s gotten into a fight or skipped class. Over and over, Cara has heard her swear that she’s going to work from home, cut back on hours, go part-time, but they aren’t exactly viable solutions and Leia is so passionate about her work that it’s hard to imagine her without it. Cara fell madly in love with Leia when Leia talked for an hour and a half about the regulations for air quality and the newly discovered dangers of silica, because Leia cares so deeply about protecting workers. When she then started talking about her thirteen-year-old son’s fascination with beetles and her eyes lit up adoringly, Cara knew for sure that she’d found the love of her life.

***

The house is quiet, without Leia. Cara woke up with Leia early in the morning, made her breakfast – as much as putting berries into yogurt can be considered cooking, anyways – and kissed her goodbye at the door. As she lingers in the entryway, an alarm begins buzzing upstairs, no doubt about to be snoozed by Ben four times in a row.

The house still feels like someone else’s, to Cara. Leia had done everything she could to make Cara feel at home, but Cara knows the feeling isn’t due to a lack of space for her shoes by the door, or not enough dresser drawers. Leia had taken care of all those things and more; she’d cleared space in the backyard for raised garden beds, changed the picture frames in the hallway to silver to match the ones Cara brought, switched from regular dish soap to the gentle-on-hands kind Cara liked, and has begun changing out things in the bedroom to skew in a more blue-green color scheme because that’s Cara’s favorite. The house isn’t the thing Cara is tentative about stepping into, just the embodiment of it.

It isn’t like Cara hadn’t known becoming a stepmom is difficult. Ben had been thirteen when she’d begun dating Leia, and though Cara hadn’t met him until eight months had passed, Leia had talked about him on their very first date. Thirteen-year-olds are notoriously moody; just like fifteen-year-olds, Cara is discovering.

Ben has begun moving around upstairs, so Cara wanders into the kitchen. There isn’t much to do; Ben’s lunch is already packed, and he routinely refuses to eat breakfast. The dishes are already clean. Cara leans in to squint at the basil plant that sits on the windowsill above the sink, plucks a withered leaf.

“Hi.”

Cara whips around guiltily at Ben’s grunted greeting, but he isn’t looking at her, and she _is_ allowed to prune the basil in her own house so the guilt is unnecessary. She forces herself to exhale.

“Good morning! Want toast or anything?”

“No.” A pause. “Thanks.” Ben is wearing his usual school outfit: black, black, more black. Black jeans, black long-sleeve shirt, black backpack. His shoes are white Converse; or at least, yesterday they’d been white. Today, they feature a pattern, and Cara tries to get a closer look as he opens the refrigerator.

“New shoes?”

“I painted them.” Ben grabs his lunch, shoves it into his backpack. “Beetles.”

“Nice.” It’s not like Ben _hates_ her, she thinks. It could be worse. His fight with Leia was more about hanging out with his Dad than not being with Cara, probably. He’s not _angry_ that his mom remarried, or that she married a woman, or that she married, specifically, the woman who had been his karate teacher when he was twelve. Cara had contemplated quitting her part-time job, when she’d started dating Leia, but Ben had already lost interest in karate, and three kids cried when Cara began announcing her departure, so she’d backtracked and said she was only going away on vacation for two weeks and not really quitting. She’d then felt compelled to take a vacation, so she wasn’t lying to them, though it was a weekend away with Leia and not two weeks long. Amazing weekend, though.

“Okay, well.” Ben shuffles past her, zips up his backpack. He’s seemingly all limbs, awkward and gangly; maybe it’s a result of hearing countless stories about Ben as a baby from Leia, but when Cara looks at him, she sees the sweet-faced toddler of Leia’s stories and it melts her, a little bit.

“I’ll be here when you get home from school!” Cara says, overly brightly. “We’ll order in for dinner, if you want. Chinese?” Is she using her ace too early? How many times can she let Ben have takeout for dinner before it becomes outright bad parenting?

“Sure,” Ben shrugs, tosses his hair out of his eyes; it promptly falls right back over his forehead. “If you want. Like. Szechwan chicken, or something.”

“Egg rolls, too.” This is starting to feel to Cara like bribery, but she’s encouraged when Ben does more of a nod than a shrug.

“Okay, well,” Ben says again, shifting his backpack on his shoulders. “Bye.”

So it’s not like Ben _hates_ her, which is good, it really is, but Cara feels more like an overstayed-welcome houseguest than a member of his family. It hasn’t been long, in the way that six months is no time at all but also feels so incredibly long. Sometimes, it feels like only yesterday that Leia was wearing a twirling white sundress and a golden floral headband, beaming at Cara and saying _my only hope is for a future filled with love and happiness for our family, and I vow to do everything I can to give that to you._ Sometimes, it feels like Leia has always been her wife, that they were meant for each other long, long before they stood in a clearing with a view of the mountains, that the ceremony with only the two of them, Ben, and the officiant was just reaffirming what they already knew.

Cara doesn’t have to be at work until one-thirty; her landscape design business has been doing pretty well lately, though she doesn’t have enough clients to be busy all day. She used to fill in the gaps with part-time work, but Leia was insistent that Cara was free to work on her landscaping business and not worry about any income beyond that. It was nice, to no longer have her schedule ruled by late-night bartending or smack in the middle of the afternoon karate classes, though she did end up missing the feisty, enthusiastic karate kids and now substitute taught there.

As is her usual free-morning tradition, she texts Din and meets him at the coffee shop two blocks from Leia’s – their – house. Din lives further away but is already there when she arrives; she’s long suspected that he comes here every morning regardless if she’s free, because he can’t make vanilla lattes at home successfully. Cara places her order and picks up her drink – vanilla cold brew – before joining him at his table by the window.

“Hey,” he says, without looking up; he’s peering down at his son, fussing with the sling. Din’s a big believer in wrap slings, and Cara feels like she’s never seen him without it. Kui is probably the cutest baby Cara’s ever seen, with big, dark eyes and a sweet, curious expression always on his face. “Boba keeps saying we should teach him Japanese,” Din says. Cara sits across from him, reaches over and snags a piece of his scone off his plate. He doesn’t seem to notice, busy gazing down at Kui. “I think he forgets we don’t speak it ourselves.”

“Yeah, you don’t want to be teaching him like, terrible nonsense grammar because you don’t speak it yourself,” Cara snickers, “maybe go with a bilingual school instead.”

“You think they have preschools like that?” Din perks up, and Cara laughs.

“A little young for preschool, isn’t he? Plus, he can’t speak _anything_ yet.”

“I suppose. He’s so smart, though, he’d pick it up so fast.” Din looks back down at the baby, smooths Kui’s hair away from his forehead. Kui seems incredibly tiny, tucked against Din’s broad chest; he’s only three months old, and came to them only two months ago. Cara was there for the lead-up to the adoption, even during the heartbreaking part where Din fell in love with a baby boy first and then a baby girl, the adoption of each falling out right near the end. She was there when Din was in the middle of his deep dive into cleft palate research, obsessed with learning everything about his future son’s condition before the baby came home to them. She drove Din and Boba to the airport for their long awaited flight to Japan, both of them anxious, Din chattering nervously, Boba silent; she picked them up when they returned, and the first time she saw the three of them together, the way Din held Kui, the way Boba was gazing at them, Cara didn’t think she’d ever been so happy for someone before.

“So how’s parenthood?” Din asks, and Cara blinks, mildly mesmerized by the tiny baby, as usual. He’s just so _small._

“Well, Ben doesn’t _hate_ me, but he did want to go to his dad’s while Leia is gone.” Cara leans back in her chair, sips her coffee. “Han lets him do, just. Whatever he wants. He’s an enthusiastic dad, but not a really structured one.”

“Kids need structure,” Din agrees.

“You kid is an _infant.”_

“Yeah, an infant with a nap schedule.”

“You guys are unbearable.” They’re one of those couples that makes simultaneously zero and complete sense. Din is quiet, intense, and deeply compassionate; Boba is mildly terrifying, snarky, and head over heels in love with Din. Cara designed their yard four years ago, has been best friends with Din ever since and while she’s never been able to really get past Boba’s made-of-steel wall, he does sit next to her at all the Small Business Owner’s Association meetings so they can whisper sarcastic remarks. She’d actually met Boba first, at the meetings; when he’d said his business was antique dealing with a focus on hunting down pieces of china to complete sets, she’d spit coffee from laughing so hard. He’d scowled, said he was serious, and then asked her to landscape his house.

“Ben will warm up to you,” Din says, like he’s sure of this. “You’re very genuine. Teenagers respond well to that.”

“Feels like everyone but me knows everything about teenagers, lately,” Cara sighs. “I just want him to like me. Why couldn’t I have met Leia earlier, when he was little and would have been easier to get to like me?”

“What makes you think he was any easier as a five year old?” Din asks, and Cara rolls her eyes. “I know, I know, he’s not a difficult kid, but I also don’t think he was the kind of little kid who loved strangers, either.”

“Okay, but. What do I _do?”_

“Just be yourself,” Din says, infuriatingly. Cara makes a face she hopes will transmit just how much she wants to smack him. Secretly, she’d been hoping for a ‘three steps to make your stepkid adore you’ and the lack of one is making her more anxious than she cares to admit.

***

The first evening goes over pretty well, Cara thinks. They order Chinese and, mildly terrified of being at a dinner table alone with Ben, Cara offers a rule-breaking “we could watch a movie and eat dinner in the living room.” Ben chooses a documentary that speculates on new animal evolutions following another ice age, and though they don’t talk much during it, Cara still feels like it was a relatively successful evening.

She’s still riding the high of it when Leia calls the next afternoon, and her franticness brings Cara crashing back down immediately.

“- I can’t believe this is happening while I’m gone, or maybe it’s _because_ I’m gone -” Leia is already talking when Cara picks up the phone, mid-sentence, and that’s how Cara knows this is about Ben. Leia is calm and collected and effective when it comes to dangerous air quality, improperly anchored cranes, poor signage and damaged temporary power cords, but loses her head when it comes to her son.

“Hey,” Cara breaks in, “slow down, muffin. Tell me what’s wrong.” Cara is just finishing her work on the client’s yard, is still kneeling in front of the last oleander she planted. The fresh scent of soil and plants is at odds with the panic she’s just entered into. 

“The school called me.” Leia takes a deep breath, exhales shakily. “Ben got into a fight again, and then he just took off. Is he at home? Did he go home? Should I come home?”

“I’ll go look right now.” Cara stands, brushes dirt from her knees and starts collecting her tools. “And no, you don’t need to come home. I’ve got this, I promise. And I know this isn’t _good_ behavior but it’s nothing that hasn’t happened before, right? I mean – I know that’s not helpful, but I’m just saying.” She doesn’t know what she’s saying. She’s terrible at parenting.

“I know.” Leia sounds comforted, though, like she gets the point Cara is trying to make. “You’re right. You’re right. It’s not good, but it’s not unprecedented. Just Ben, acting out…” her voice wobbles a little. “Is it the divorce? I thought he was doing okay with it!”

Leia and Han divorced back when Ben was eight; surely seven years was enough time that he’d – well, not _get over_ it, but stop getting into fights at school due to his anger over it? Maybe it was because his mom had married Cara six months ago. But – yesterday evening had been okay. Cara hates that being desperate to understand doesn’t seem to mean anything, because she’s still lost.

“He won’t pick up his cell or the house phone,” Leia says, still sounds liable to run to the nearest airport. “If he’s not at home, maybe try Caffeine Bean, or – probably not that comic shop anymore, he likes the board games one better, but – shouldn’t I know more places where he hangs out?!”

“I’ll go look,” Cara promises. “I’ll tell you when I find him, okay? I’m sure he’s okay, and just didn’t want to go back to class.”

“I love you,” Leia says desperately, “it makes me feel so much better that you’re there.”

Cara doesn’t exactly share Leia’s confidence in her presence helping this situation, but it’s nice to know Leia’s comforted by it. Cara says goodbye and then quickly gathers up her tools, tosses them into the bed of her truck and drives the few blocks to the house.

Ben isn’t at home, and he isn’t at his favorite coffee shop, the board games store or the comic store; Cara has to stand on the sidewalk and take a few deep breaths, trying to formulate a plan. If Leia doesn’t know where else to look, Cara sure as hell doesn’t know where teenagers hang out. Where would an angry, school-skipping kid go?

The description gives Cara an idea, and she heads down the street until she reaches Fett’s Antiques Emporium, easily recognized from down the street by the giant pots of flowers she personally planted for them. Right now, they feature riotously bright tulips, though Cara doesn’t stop to admire them as she rushes through the front door.

The shop has a few customers milling around, and an older woman inspecting an armoire gives Cara a baffled look as Cara bursts through the door. Cara ignores this and beelines for the counter, where a young woman rings up an assortment of vases for a customer.

“Is Boba here?” Cara asks, and the girl nods, doesn’t look up as she squints at a barcode.

“Back office, yelling about teacup saucers on the phone as usual. God help us if he has to track down a gravy boat.” The girl grins up at Cara; Cara wishes she could share the good mood. She hurries around the counter and heads to the office.

Inside, Boba is not actually on the phone. He’s standing at the worktable, wrapping pieces of china and placing them into a box to ship.

“What’s up, Cara,” he says, without turning around. Cara still doesn’t know how he can do it.

“Kid problems.”

“Yeah?” he stops wrapping, turns and leans back against the table with his arms crossed. If seeing Din be incredibly soft with their baby had been a surprise, seeing Boba wipe a dropped pacifier on his shirt with the care of a surgeon sterilizing equipment had about knocked Cara off her feet. Cara said it was just because Boba was so buff and snarky, but really, it was because she knew he’d seen his only parent die in front of him and she was shocked that so much softness could come from such a tragic childhood. Then again, maybe his fierce desire to adopt and love an orphaned kid wasn’t so surprising.

“Ben got in a fight and disappeared. Where do kids go?”

Boba makes a thoughtful sound, thinks for a few long moments. “There’s this access road,” he says, and then he draws her a map and sends her on her way. Cara leaves still thinking about the angry teenager Boba must have been, maybe angry all the way until he turned forty, met Din, and remembered what it was like to have people in his corner.

***

Cara can’t handle _one_ teenager. She is very much not expecting to find _two_ of them, hiding out in the woods exactly where Boba said he used to go to sulk. Cara barely knows how to take care of the one teenager she’s entrusted with, so when she comes upon Ben and his friend Hux, she’s thrown off immediately.

They’re sitting in the dirt beneath a gigantic tree, and Hux sees her first, flinching towards Ben beside him. Ben looks up quickly, too, but – and Cara can’t help but feel a little happier at this – relaxes when he sees it’s her. He doesn’t exactly say hi, but he watches her walk up to them without looking alarmed.

“Hi, guys,” Cara says. She puts her hands in her back pockets, doesn’t know what else to do with them. Hux squints up at her like he’s never seen her before, which is fair, because he’s never come over to the house. Cara only knows who he is because she’s picked up Ben at school a few times when it was raining, and she saw him talking to Ben before Ben ran over to the car. _That’s Hux,_ Ben had said, when Cara asked just to make conversation, _he just moved here. I’m his only friend. For now, I mean._ He’d gone sulkily silent afterwards, and Cara hadn’t known how to reassure him that Hux wouldn’t stop being his friend even if he met other people too. She’d been too nervous that she was wrong, because how did she know? She couldn’t comfort Ben, she couldn’t guarantee this kid _wouldn’t_ stop being his friend, and she didn’t want to lie to him to make him feel better.

“This is Cara,” Ben says to Hux, nudging Hux with his knee. “My stepmom.” Cara is oddly touched that he just didn’t introduce her as the woman who married his mom. His _stepmom._ She wants to hug him. She refrains.

“Hi,” Cara says, again. She’s terrible with kids. “You guys okay? Your mom said you spent the afternoon kicking some kid’s ass and then cutting school.” This, surprisingly, makes Ben smile a little, just for a moment.

“Yeah,” he says, tosses his hair out of his eyes, “this kid was – well. He was being a dick.”

“You don’t need to punch every guy that says something to me,” Hux mutters under his breath, “don’t get thrown out of school on my account.” This brings a heartbreakingly concerned look to Ben’s face. He’s never looked so much like Leia, Cara thinks. “Who cares, anyways?” Hux’s voice rises a little, a tense anger on his face, a hardness in his voice that makes Cara want to hug him, too. “Even if you make Conner stop, what does it matter? There’s still Troy, and Jake, and fucking –” he looks overwhelmed with hurt anger, like he might start punching something or crying, and when Cara looks at Ben, he has a helplessness on his face that threatens to drown him.

“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Cara announces, because Ben is clearly fishing desperately for something to say and coming up with nothing, “we’re going to-”

“Don’t call Jeff and Mona,” Hux blurts out.

“Are those your parents…?”

“No,” Hux spits out. He doesn’t offer any clarification.

“Well… I’ll leave the calling to you, but we’re going to go home. It’s practically four thirty, you guys are probably hungry.”

“Maybe,” Ben says. He’s watching her like a soldier listening to a strategical plan from his general. 

“We have Chinese food left over, and there’s cupcakes.”

“You baked?” Ben gets to his feet, brushing off his jeans. “You don’t bake. Mom bakes.”

“I could bake if I wanted to,” Cara protests, on principle. She starts walking back towards her truck, dry leaves crackling beneath her feet; she can hear the two boys following her.

“I don’t think you could,” Ben says thoughtfully.

“It’s not exactly rocket science. I could probably get through a batch of cookies without killing us all,” Cara says, and feels a surge of pride when Ben snickers. “Anyways, no, I didn’t make them. My friend Din brought them over this morning.”

“What kind?” Ben says, as though this is the deciding factor in whether they’ll be coming home with her.

“Chocolate and strawberry. He made them for his dad’s birthday, and apparently didn’t realize that making mini cupcakes meant he was going to end up with like, twenty five of them.” Personally, Cara found it sweet how big a deal Din made of his adoptive dad’s birthday; she was pretty distant with her own parents, and had recently begun worrying that this had primed her to be a bad parent. But, she couldn’t be doing _that_ badly, not right now. She’d found Ben, after all.

She brings the boys home, tells them to do their homework and gives them dinner; it’s all relatively simple, but it seems to have given her false confidence, because when night falls and it’s time for Hux to go home, she pulls a Real Parent move. Maybe it’s because, when she called Leia to update her, Leia said “you’re doing _amazing,_ honey,” and that always makes Cara feel like she can do anything.

“I’m going to drop Hux off at home,” she tells Ben, as Hux packs up his schoolwork in the kitchen.

“I’ll come,” Ben says, starts for his shoes.

“No, you stay here,” Cara says, and Ben blinks at her in surprise. Cara understands the feeling. She doesn’t know where the Real Parent voice came from, either. “He’ll be okay, I’m not going to drive him into the woods and kick him out.”

“Okay.” Ben gives her another questioning look, but he doesn’t look upset. Almost relieved, like he’s glad to have an adult step into what Cara’s beginning to suspect is a tangled situation. He just kept looking at Hux like he was afraid Hux was going to break down or explode, and Cara can see how a sensitive kid like Ben would take on whatever’s going on with Hux and his situation, expect himself to carry it alone.

So Cara acts like a Real Parent, and suddenly she’s in the truck alone with a teenager in need of parenting, and _she’s_ the parent in the scenario. It’s terrifying.

“So,” Cara starts. Hux stares out the window in silence. Leia would have something wonderful to say, Cara thinks desperately. Leia is so good at parenting. “What’s up?” God, Cara is bad at this.

“I dunno,” Hux says. Cara waits to think of something to say. She’s driving five miles beneath the speed limit, to stretch out the drive. “Ben shouldn’t get in trouble,” Hux mumbles.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. He was just defending me. Connor’s a dick. If anyone should get in trouble, it’s him. Not that he did anything that bad, you know? But Ben doesn’t want school to suck for me.”

“Yeah?” Cara really needs to figure out something more to say. Leia would know what to say. Would say something gentle, comforting, that draws an answer out of Hux.

“He knows it sucks at home, so. He just wants school to be okay for me. Home’s not even that bad. It was worse, with my dad. This isn’t even that bad.”

“Is it a little bad?”

“I mean.” Hux keeps staring out the window. Cara doesn’t dare look over at him and break the spell that’s apparently settled over him. “It could be worse.”

“Just because it _could_ be worse doesn’t mean where you’re at isn’t bad,” Cara says. She’s immediately sure she’s said the wrong thing, because Hux gives a tiny sniffle. “You don’t have to figure it out yourself,” Cara goes on. It seems like something Leia would do, remind Hux that he isn’t alone, is just a kid and doesn’t have to take on the whole world. “Having a shitty home situation isn’t on you to fix. You can-” she stops, wincing. She was about to say _tell an adult,_ like an advice column or something. Exactly the sort of things kids dismiss, and who can blame them?

“Can what?” Hux asks, small but a little sharp, like he can sense a bullshit line about to be delivered and if she says _trusted adult,_ he’ll throw himself out of the car.

“Look, I know you literally just met me,” Cara says instead, “but I will do every fucking thing I can think of to get you out of there. I promise.”

Hux is quiet for a long moment. “Okay,” he says, soft, but it feels like a step in the right direction.

When Cara gets home after dropping Hux off with his foster parents, Ben is still awake, even though it’s nearly midnight. Not that he has a bedtime, or certainly not one that Cara feels confident enough to enforce. Instead of complaining, she just joins him on the couch. The second part of the documentary from last night is on, this time featuring the barren desert landscape that’s apparently in Earth’s future. Ben is quiet, but it feels like a different sort of quiet.

“Don’t tell your mom I said this,” Cara eventually says, as they watch CGI lizards scuttle across the desert, “but I think it’s nice you hit that kid. I mean, don’t go around punching people, but, wanting Hux to have somewhere in his life that doesn’t suck – it’s a good thing.”

“I know there’s better ways to deal with it,” Ben says, still a little guarded, like he’s expecting a lecture. Cara shrugs.

“Sure, but maybe it takes a few wrong ways to make you want to find the right ones.” She fusses with the blanket in her lap. Once again, a tough conversation better suited for an expert parent. “The fact that you care so much about him, I promise that’s making a big difference to him.” “

Ben is quiet for so long, Cara almost thinks the conversation is over. They watch caterpillar-like things onscreen, soaking up the desert sun.

“Can we help him?” Ben finally says. Cara pauses to gain bravery, and then reaches over to put an arm around Ben’s shoulders, squeezes gently.

“Yeah. I’ll do everything I can.” She has no idea _what_ to do, but Ben leans into her and Cara knows she’ll move heaven and earth for this kid. Her kid.

***

In the morning, Ben actually sits at the counter long enough to eat toast and ask her if they can move Hux out of his foster family’s house today.

“A lot has to happen first,” Cara says, “it sucks, but there’s a lot involved with foster kid placement. I’m going to start looking up – oh, _shit,_ Din! _”_ she blurts, suddenly remembering. Ben looks up from his toast. “Din is a social worker. Or, he was, he’s on paternity leave, or whatever. I completely forgot.”

“The cupcake guy with the baby sling?”

“Yeah,” Cara says, and she’s absolutely going to be passing along that description to Din. “I’ll talk to him today. He’ll know where to start.”

She isn’t supposed to meet Din at the coffee shop for another two hours today, so she compensates by going straight to his house instead. Boba answers the door, holding a plastic rattle in one hand. It’s shaped like a giraffe. 

“Hey,” he says, steps back without asking what she wants. “Din’s in the kitchen.” Cara follows him into their sunlit kitchen, where Din is drinking coffee at the counter, Kui in his little bouncer chair on top of the kitchen table. Din looks at her with the same lack of surprise.

“Couldn’t wait?” he asks mildly. Cara sits, pours herself a cup of coffee, and tells him everything. Din listens quietly, doesn’t interrupt as she babbles about finding the boys, Ben getting in a fight with Hux’s bully because Hux has a bad home life and school life, and promising them that things would somehow get better.

“And then I remembered you’re a social worker,” she finally concludes. “So… help me.”

“Is this kid’s first name Hux?” Boba asks from the kitchen table. Cara hadn’t even known he was still in the room, and turns to look at him. He has one hand on Kui’s seat, bouncing it gently while Kui grasps the giraffe rattle and shakes it.

“Um, I have no idea. I guess it sounds more like a last name?”

“I worked with his dad. Not in antiques,” he says, probably in response to Cara’s surprised look. “When I was a cop. He was one of the real assholes.” Cara manages to forget that Boba was a cop; it was how he met Din, though, when they were involved with the same case. Cara heard the story from Din, who says that Boba became a cop out of a desire to protect people the way his dad hadn’t been protected, and quit because he’d felt like he wasn’t helping anyone, just making things worse.

“So… what can we do?”

“Adopt him,” Boba says, and Cara arches her eyebrows, but there is nothing but sincerity on his face.

“I’ll look into things,” Din promises. “We’ll figure something out.”

He says it like there might be a multitude of solutions, but when Cara looks at Boba, she’s pretty sure Boba thinks there’s only one.

The rest of the day goes by slowly, but somehow, Cara’s still surprised that it’s already three o’clock when it’s announced by the opening of the front door. She’s in the kitchen – not baking, she hasn’t completely lost her mind, the boys may have scarfed down a shocking number of cupcakes but she’s still got Din for her bakery needs – trying to make dinner. It’s not that she _can’t_ cook, just that she’s trying to cook something she’s seen Leia do a hundred times and apparently just watching hasn’t committed it to memory as much as she was hoping.

“Hey there,” she calls over her shoulder. She squints at the pan of macaroni and the pile of shredded cheese beside it. The proportion of Gruyere to Colby just isn’t looking right.

“Hi,” she hears, and hadn’t been expecting Ben to actually come into the kitchen, let alone sit at the counter. She looks over and yes, there he is.

“How was school?” she asks. Is that a dumb question? It doesn’t drive Ben away, at least.

“Okay.” A pause. “You’re gonna do more Gruyere, right?”

“Oh, God, I don’t know. Please help me.” Cara holds out the cutting board. “How much more, do you think?”

“Like, twice that.” He watches her grate cheese for a few minutes, and when she glances back again, he’s gotten out his textbook and binder. “So did you find out anything for Hux?” he asks, half a mumble.

“I talked to Din this morning. He’s going to talk to his coworkers, and find out the procedure to – well, I don’t really know what exact solution this will get, it depends on a lot of things, but something to make it better,” Cara says, and Ben nods along.

He doesn’t disappear upstairs like usual; he does his homework at the counter, sits there texting on his phone for a while, and then they have dinner while watching the third part of his futuristic nature documentary. Cara agrees because she thinks she’s still terrified to sit at the table and come up with conversations, but finds that they talk through the movie anyways. About forest-dwelling squids and flying fish, but still. Ben’s a funny kid, with a sense of humor as dry as Leia’s; Cara wishes Leia was here too, but not because she’s desperate for parenting help, just because she thinks Leia would love this. Cara loves it.

***

“I missed you _so much,”_ Cara says, probably for the seventh time since picking Leia up from the airport, which they’ve only just left ten minutes ago. It’s been two and a half weeks, and despite talking nearly every day, Leia has been missing from her life like a critical element in the air, or maybe the air itself.

“I missed you too,” Leia smiles. “I wish I was here for you these last two weeks. How come the craziest things have to happen when I’m gone? You had so much to deal with.” She reaches over to squeeze Cara’s hand, and Cara never wants to let go. “You did amazing with Ben, you know. He adores you.”

“He didn’t before?” Cara teases, although this news has her grinning. Leia laughs.

“I think he’s really started to bond with you.”

“I hope I handled all this okay. It was kind of insane, you know?” Cara blows out a breath, shakes her head. “He does his homework in the kitchen now, did I tell you that?”

“You did,” Leia beams.

***

The last Tuesday of the month arrives, and Cara is almost late to the Small Business Owner’s Association meeting; she’s oddly touched when she sees Boba’s saved her the seat beside him.

“How’re things?” she asks, sitting. Boba shrugs.

“Got the kid,” he says, and she rolls her eyes.

“Yeah, I assumed you still have Kui,” she says, “I literally saw him this morning. You still have your husband, too, if you’re listing obvious things.” 

“No,” Boba says, fidgets a little, “Armitage.”

“Ar – _Hux?_ Ben’s friend?” Is she in a parallel universe where they didn’t adopt a baby, but a teenager?

“Not adopted yet, that takes more work, but. We got him placed with us. We were already registered as foster parents from before Kui, so.” He summarizes what must have been a mountain of paperwork and countless meetings with a shrug.

“You’re going to raise a baby and a teenager? At the same time?” Cara asks. Boba nods, like this is obviously the only acceptable thing to do. She’s long suspected he’s a really good person and just doesn’t let anyone know it.

“I couldn’t let an orphaned kid have a shitty life. That fucks you up, for a long time. Not everyone will meet someone that turns them around. When you have no one starting from really young, you think you’ll always have no one, and it fucks you up,” Boba says, and it’s the most Cara has ever had him open up to her. She suddenly feels like crying. She knows a lot more about Din than Boba, who lost his parents in a car accident when very young and was pretty immediately taken in by his father’s best friend. Boba, she knows only that he lost his dad at the age of fourteen, that it was violent and tragic, that eventually he became a cop, that when Din met him, he was harsh and angry at the whole world but not unfeeling in the way everyone thought he was. She didn’t know the details of the case that had brought them together, but Din said that he’d gone back to the police station, to tell Boba that the kid involved had been placed with family and was going to be okay, because he’d thought Boba would want to know; Din said that Boba had nodded, said little in response. Din had lingered in the building for a while, taking care of some other work things, and when he’d gone out to the parking lot, he’d seen Boba hiding in his car, sobbing. Din had fallen in love on the spot; it had reportedly taken a long time to actually get together, but Din had known from right that moment that there was a lot more to Boba than he allowed anyone to know.

“You guys are just. Perfect for each other,” she says, all she can manage. “Hux is going to be so much happier.” Boba’s quiet for a long moment. The meeting starts, but Cara still feels like he’s about to say something. It takes nearly fifteen minutes.

“I think Hux likes us,” he finally says, quiet. “I mean. I hope so. I think he does.”

Cara smiles so big that the speaker at the front of the room gives her a puzzled look, probably because he’s talking about the parking problems at his store, and she’s beaming.

***

A year later, on a rainy Saturday in October, Cara gets two unexpected phone calls in a row. The first is from Boba, which is possibly the first time he’s ever called her. He texts, usually in the form of pictures of bad parking jobs with curse words as commentary. Din also doesn’t call her, but his pictures are usually of plants he thought she’d like.

“Hello?” Cara asks, baffled. She half expects he called her on accident. Is butt-dialing still a thing, with touchscreens?

“Armitage called me Dad this morning,” Boba says, all at once. “He’s said it before, but only like, when he’s talking to Kui about us, so I thought he was doing it for Kui’s sake, but he said it to my face.” A pause. “I mean, he was complaining that we took his phone away for staying out so late last night, but.” Another pause. “You know we only have him because of you, right?” he says, and then his voice gets so incredibly soft, “thank you, by the way. I love him so fucking much. I think he’s really happy now.”

“You’re the ones that did everything,” Cara says, but it’s the second time Boba’s nearly made her cry by being so soft.

The second call comes a half hour later, while she’s hanging out in the living room with Leia. Leia’s just gone to get a sparkling water from the refrigerator when Cara’s phone rings again, and when she sees it’s Ben, she answers right away.

“What’s up?” she asks. Maybe he tried to call Leia first, but she hadn’t heard Leia’s phone ring.

“So, uh.” Ben’s trying to sound casual. “Can you come – well, not pick me up, exactly, but can you, um. Come here?”

“Sure. Where is ‘here?’” Cara wants to ask quite a few more questions, but she refrains. He tells her he’s at the gym, and then she goes to find Leia. “I’ll be right back,” she says, “I don’t know why, but I have to go see Ben at the gym.”

“Why?” Leia arches an eyebrow. “What has that child done? He’s only vague when he’s in trouble.”

“I have no idea.”

“Well, alright,” Leia says, oddly chipper for having been told Ben is clearly up to something. “It’s cute he called you first,” she says, at Cara’s questioning look. “Go ahead, see what the little troublemaker’s been up to.” She kisses Cara and shoos her off.

What Ben’s been up to, apparently, is backing Leia’s old car into a lamppost in the parking lot of the gym. Cara parks beside him, and then opens his passenger door, sits in the car with him.

“It’s bad, isn’t it? It looks really bad,” Ben says, and his eyes are huge. Cara shrugs. It’s a dent, but it’s the scratched paint that’s making it look worse than it is.

“You only hit a lamppost, not a person,” she says, “and I’m sure you’ll look really carefully from now on.”

“I will! I swear,” Ben runs his hands back and forth along the steering wheel. “Mom’s going to kill me.”

“Everyone has accidents. She won’t be thrilled, but I’m sure she’d much rather a slow-speed, backing up in bad visibility accident with a lamppost than a freeway one.”

“She’s still going to freak out.”

“Well, maybe,” Cara allows. Leia did have a tendency to freak out when it came to Ben in danger, but that tended to involve a lot of hugging of Ben. She’s about to ask if Ben is okay to drive the car home, but he’s still looking in the rearview mirror anxiously, so she waits. “I heard Hux is happy with Din and Boba,” she says.

“Oh, yeah. He’s a lot better now. His dads are weird, but they’re nice.”

“Weird, huh?”

“Uh, have you _met_ them? Din still uses the baby sling like, all the time, and like, every time I have dinner at their house, Boba talks about teacups for like an hour. Some of the guys at school who always were dicks to him, now they laugh about how he’s got two dads, but I don’t think he gives a shit.” Ben pauses, taps his fingers along the wheel. Rain keeps tapping against the windshield and roof. “They make fun of us, cos, you know. He’s got two dads. I’ve got, like. Two moms.” He glances over at Cara, and she does her best not to stare at him until she figures out what he’s getting at. “I mean, I know I’m not, like. Your actual kid, or whatever.”

“Well,” Cara shrugs. “I love you like you are.” She does, is the thing. In between being terrified about learning to be a stepmom, it’s become impossible to imagine her life without both Leia and Ben. Ben looks like he might be trying not to smile.

What feels like a very long time ago, Leia had said ‘you know, I have my son. Dating me is – it’s getting him, too, always’ like she wanted to make sure Cara knew they were a package deal, because Cara might think that was a bad thing. Cara had been nervous, but she was so deeply in love with Leia already, couldn’t imagine life without her, and she couldn’t imagine Leia without Ben, anyways. And now, now Cara can’t imagine herself without Ben, either.

**Author's Note:**

> With a little follow-up fic that's the din/boba backstory!   
> https://icehot13.tumblr.com/post/630387387940339712/its-the-bobadin-backstory-from-the-caraleia-au


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